A Sandstone Farmhouse by John Updike, 1990
The magic trick:
Poignantly recalling the protagonist’s dead mother after many pages of the protagonist mostly reflecting on himself
A different kind of weekend double for you this time. Two stories about protagonists cleaning out a recently deceased parent’s house.
We start in Pennsylvania with Updike revisiting that sandstone farmhouse.
I will highlight a brief section near the end of the story as a particularly powerful piece of writing. Our protagonist’s mother has died, and he begins to cry at the funeral when a vision of her as a young woman chasing after a trolley in the city appears in his mind. The story describes the vision vividly for us. But more importantly, it’s really the first glimpse we get of the woman acting or existing for herself. The protagonist’s thoughts produce pages and pages of story reflecting on her death essentially as an opportunity to consider himself, his own childhood, and how her life impacted him.
After such a single note set of thoughts, this image of her – purely about her, mourning for her – is especially poignant.
And that’s quite a trick on Updike’s part.
The selection:
His tears came and kept coming, in a kind of triumph, a breakthrough, a torrent of empathy and pity for that lost young women running past the row houses, under the horse-chestnut trees, running to catch the trolley, the world of the thirties shabby and solid around her, the porches, the blue midsummer hydrangeas, this tiny well-dressed figure in her diminishing pocket of time, her future unknown, her death, her farm, far from her mind.
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